DAAS BOOK

Death
D. loosened the straps around my ankles.  He stood with eyes closed before me, crossed himself, then loosened the straps around my wrists.  The numbness that began in my neck spread.  D. removed the needle - goodnight sweet prince!  The next sensation is difficult to describe.  I tumbled forward, or seemed to tumble.  I seemed to watch myself tumble forward.  I watched with my wrists and ankles firmly held.  I watched from the uncomfortable chair.  I was displaced, dislodged, on a different angle from my known existance.  I could feel it in my head just as freshly as I felt this numbness.  Gravity had grabbed my hand, leading me down a new path.  I submitted with flailing limbs, submitted to its deceitful pull.  Inside my head I felt a pulse and my body was pulsing in time with that pulse, louder, louder, until all I could hear was that dull thud.  I was over-eager, desperate for some conclusion.  Then the beauty of falling began to dominate my mind.  The exquisite subtle sense of the air humming!  No! Singing close to my ears, as if my whole body was a shell with the spiral of noise swimming within it.  Buoyant.  Jubilant.  I felt all around me a solidness in what was not solid.  For the first time I had an awareness of the physicality of my surroundings.  The air filled every crevice.  Every hair tingled with its caress as its fingers playfully tossed my body.  Spun silk.  Time which I have always viewed with such contempt, became abstracted.  Time had always run too quickly when joy embraced me.  While during periods of trial an age would pass.  Unabated, inexhaustible, it never seemed stretched towards eternity.  I could see the curve upon the horizon.  Gravity's condemnation had finally turned to adoration.  The wind kissed me, gently nursing my body and the air, the air ... rolled me in roses.


Sunday's Child
Sunday's child is drab and grey,
Monday's child sees horrors all day,
Tuesday's child has a mouth full of flies,
Wednesday's child is chased by spies,
Thursday's child is wild and brave,
Friday's child to an early grave,
Saturday's child no-one can save


Running, running.  My coat flaps flying absurdly behind me in the wind tunnel of No Man's Land.  A rifle cracks and momentarily I am carried into the air, only to land face down in the filthy ashphalt.  My ears are buzzing.  There is a seeping, sickening warmth creeping across my back and rising in my throat.


It was late.  The dawn was approaching, and in that darkness I thought I saw something, but I didn't.  Outside, beyond the city, the rain continued to fall in a steady depressing stream ...


Death is a humorous thing.  It tends to make honest men and women of us all.  Once you are under the earth, immersed in the sea, as ash or dust - gone to meet your maker, snuffed the candle, hopped the twig, joined that invisible chair, dashed your brains on the concrete, gone the way of all flesh to awake in life immortal - you become infinitely more popular.  The distance you have placed between yourself and those still living seems to the latter an unbridgeable void.  Too close, perhaps, for comfort.  When a friend or acquaintance is forcibly removed from the circles you yourself move in, there is initially a shock.  Our own mortality is thrown in question with one inevitable conclusion - it comes to us all in time.  There is a tendency for tears, a feeling of loss.  How tragic to be taken so young, and how she wasn't ready, and with him so beautiful, or greedily you think why wasn't it me.  As well as these 'humane' thoughts the mind excuses itself in a myriad of ways - what a bore, a feeble friend at best - a contemptible, meagre scab of a man, and the gladness that it was not time for yourself.  It is time that tends to mellow these emotions of bitterness.  After one year, an acquaintance is a dear friend, an enemy, an acquaintance.  You can afford to be generous because you are alive.  The dead cannot refute you.  One year to forget those annoying inadequacies, his disgusting manners, her way of tapping the tea cup with her spoon, her heavy-lidded eyes, his dress sense; you forgive these petty transgressions.  You have a noble heart.  You are in a position to be noble.  After two years the milder faults are forgotten, time has mellowed your mind.  You think how frivolous you were together, remember more often the good times.


No-one has died that I do not remember more fondly in death than in life.  Hopefully the same will occur when I am ill-fated enough to fall.  Perhaps I will attain some popularity in this world when I am in the next.


The cracks in the wall started to snap like the mouths of dogs.  A fierce wind blew up in the room, hurling sheets and furniture into the cracks.  Snap, snap, bang, bang, bang-shang!  I could hear my head hitting the floor.  The air was alive with wind and sheets and a shrieking hum.  I was picked up and blown into a snapping crack.  A darkness filled it like a vapour.  It descended like black velvet across my eyes.  Vague forms swam in the darkness.  Hints of white veils and the echoes of colour darted like startled fish about me.  My head had grown to the size of a pumpkin.  My torso had withered until it hung like a twig from my head.  I lay perfectly still.  From the dark an arm with black veins appeared, reaching towards me.  It seemed to shimmer with a blue light.  The hand touched my face.